In recent years, mobile terminals have been widely popularized and become one of the necessities of life. With advances in communication technologies, mobile terminals can provide not only functions related to call processing and message handling but also functions related to Instant Messaging (IM), which has been supported by personal computers. In particular, a recently developed mobile terminal permits the user to join multiple IM communities at the same time, and the user can simultaneously receive two or more IM services.
During using an IM service, a user can set presence information to notify other users of the presence status, and may update the presence information using a presence information setting menu.
FIG. 9 illustrates screen representations of a multi-session presence information update according to a conventional procedure.
As illustrated in FIG. 9, to change the presence status to ‘Away’ in conversation with “IM community A”, the user touches a menu for presence information setting 1, touches ‘Away’ for selection 2, and touches ‘OK’ for updating 3. Then, to change the presence status to ‘Busy’ for “IM community C”, the user touches an item for IM community selection 4, touches “IM community C” for selection 5, touches a menu for presence information setting 6, touches ‘Busy’ for selection 7, and touches ‘OK’ for updating 8.
That is, to change the presence information for two IM communities, the user has to perform eight touch operations. If the user has joined four IM communities, the user may have to perform 18 touch operations to update presence information. With the increasing number of IM communities, the user may have to perform a large number of touch operations to change the presence status.
Even when the user joins multiple IM communities, the user is the same, and hence has preferably the same presence status for all the multiple IM communities. However, in related art technology, when the user desires to change the presence status for multiple IM communities, the user has to change the presence status for one of the IM communities at a time. Thereby, the user may be inconvenienced by having to perform a large number of manipulations.
Accordingly, in updating the user presence status for multiple IM communities, it is necessary to provide a means to reduce the number of user manipulations.